Author: Katie Mather

I’m 35 and it’s still the end of term.

Cycling in the Forest of Bowland this week I got caught up in some after-school traffic and realised I’d stumbled across the end of the summer term. The air crackled with a hundred thoughts of six whole weeks of freedom. The drizzly grey clouds that had threatened to pour down all day held off, and the sun glinted off the parked cars and damp leaves.

The end of term is the start of a new life. A regeneration into a new year of growth, a step forward. Six weeks to rest and play before the demands of the world begin again.

I remember the last day of term and what it meant. The buzz and the nerves, the change in routine. How it never came and then all of a sudden, it was there. Assemblies about staying safe and returning refreshed. Buses parked up waiting to take us home for the last time in forever. Sun—always sun.

We left the school scuffed and thin from a year of tests and tight silence, the loudness in our bodies unsure of how to escape, trained for so long to be quiet and still. A world ahead of us. A lapping sea.

Cycling past these kids, I wondered if they knew that living is not a fibre optic flash from birth to death—that their lives would forever be full of these endings and beginnings. Because life is not about books closing and opening. It is a movement in all directions at once. It is unknowable except in the precise moment you acknowledge it. It is yours. It is the constant movement of the clouds, the rippling of long grass, the smell of fire.

You might already know that this week I announced the closure of the bar myself and my husband Tom built together. It has been a hard journey through difficult and often impossible circumstances, and we don’t enjoy knowing that we are taking away something positive from the world. We are trying to look at it from a different perspective—at least it existed. The end of something is only the start of something else.

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Thanks for reading my newsletter and supporting my work. You’ve kept hope alive.

Other Stuff

• The Farmer’s Arms is an inspirational and wholesome pub in the heart of the South Lakes. Its 100m salad is an idea that makes me happy to think about, their arts and crafts events sell out weeks in advance, and this blog post about the pub’s role in Lakeland Rally’s golden era shows just how diverse a great pub’s community is.

• The poem Love After Love by Derek Walcott. Feast on your life.

• I love these sketchbook entries by illustrator Kathryn Boyt.

• If you’ve not read Rachel Hendry’s piece on wine and the TV show Succession, rectify that now.

• Vintage TdF photos for all who are celebrating.

Using music to find a way in the dark

One thing I’ve learned about trawling Youtube for playlists that can simultaneously soothe, motivate and energise me is that there are a lot of people out there looking to name and exorcise a feeling of vanishing. An existentialist fog, or a void-like breeze, that touches everything with an eerie shade of unreality. Thousands of people are, every day, searching for musical backdrops to locate and quench a feeling of disconnection—to find very specific liminal spaces in their minds, and, I think, trap them by seeing them clearly, by making them knowable. Like a made-up city in a recurring dream, by focusing on the brickwork of these amorphous sensations, perhaps they become less daunting, more comfortable. These audio spaces are hyperspecific in their descriptions: you are inside a Monet painting, the last night bus, study like Nikola Tesla creating inventions, falling asleep in the car on a rainy afternoon. There is fragile beauty in each of these curations—they attempt to pinpoint exact, personal emotions in a relatable way, and as unlikely as it seems, millions of views for each video proves that the sharper these hypodermic references are, the more they hit the mark.

Where the void (a term used in BPD circles and treatment to reference the absence of or inability to define emotion—the void can last moments or days depending on the episode) can be a black hole taking in and vaporising thoughts of comfort, in these playlists I can find ways to play with its distortion of reality. Daydreaming has always been my preferred state of being, and learning to find and clarify these powerful places in my mind has been empowering. Liminal spaces have always fascinated and terrified me—there is something so unnerving about a bus stop at 2am, a burnt out car on a country layby, the shuttered and abandoned buildings of a purpose-built retail park gone to ruin. I notice that it’s only human-created places that give me these chills. Nature is never abandoned, always busy, constant and alive. In considering this, I’ve learned to counter the void with the fields and woods around my house. In a way, these playlists have helped me take a healing step, and I owe much to their mysterious creators.

Katie Mather’s The Gulp is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Other Stuff

• The clove tree that ended a colonising monopoly

• A history of Victorian garden graveyards

• One of my current favourite playlists—it’s actually a mix by Christian Loffler accompanied by video taken from the beach in Northern Germany near where he lives

My Stuff

I’ve not had much stuff published recently as I’ve not been in a position to write often, however if you follow Pellicle I’ll be writing much more in the coming months. I also have a feature commissioned for an upcoming issue of Hwaet! zine, and am still writing for Glug and Ferment. My book, published by Wine52, will be available later this year.

I’ve also taken the step to disconnect my Twitter account. I’m working hard to live more in the real world, and my biggest hope is that this will reflect positively on my writing. We’ll see.

Katie Mather’s The Gulp is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Lose the pub, lose important conversations.

Tom and I play cards and drink pints in our local pub about two or three times a week. We go because it’s a comfortable place to be, and because it’s nice to feel remembered and familiar somewhere—and also at the moment because the lure of a proper fire is irresistible. We also go to The New Inn because often, the conversations you get drawn into take you by surprise.

Now, our local has something of a reputation for having certain regulars who repeat jingoistic balls from certain newspapers verbatim, but walk away and you’ll find people worth speaking to. Like the man in khaki and combat boots, with his shiny antifash badges from the 1970s, always rolling a tab, ready for the class war when it comes. Or the fella with Bedlington terriers and a fantastic selection of metal tees—we got chatting when it turned out that, yes, he was actually wearing a Sólstafir shirt. There’s the guys who teach us how to play dominoes, and the guy who drinks red wine and likes to talk about films. These are some of the people I know in passing at the pub. Pubmates.

But today’s newsletter isn’t about them. It’s about Tom—another Tom—and Phil, two men I’ve seen in the pub for more than a decade, but never chatted to before.

The pub was quiet, except for one man, revving himself up about immigration and benefits. He had many opinions, loud ones, formed from facts he’d only half-remembered. My Tom could tell I was about to get involved and gently nipped my arm. It means—it’s not worth it. It means—this man is not worth ruining your pint over. Across the bar, a man in his 70s bides his time while his pint settles. The politician asks nobody in particular whether they think a well-known local businessman ever had any handouts. When nobody in particular answers, he agrees with himself that this is because he set up his business through sheer hard work, adding that he never took any handouts. The man across the bar clears his throat.

“Have you asked him about that?” he asks.

“Asked who?”

“[businessman’s name]. Have you asked ‘im? Whether he had any help setting up?”

Without waiting for an answer he took his pint back to the lounge, and we followed him. I wanted to know what he knew about this businessman.

Our quiet afternoon pint became an hour-long discussion about the distance between people’s understanding of what working class means, and what it is. We spoke about benefits—”I’ve been on ‘em. He ‘as (pointing at other Tom, who tells us he’s in his 80s.) There’s no shame in it. It’s what they’re there fuh.” We spoke about the retirement age and the state pension—issues close to their lives, but they were incredibly sympathetic to our generation too, who probably won’t even get to retire. Then we talked about the strikes. We talked about how frustrating it is to hear people wilfully misunderstand the point of strike action and unionisation. To hear people side with the Tories against the rights of their friends, neighbours, fellow workers—themselves.

Tom and Phil left for their teas, and we made a move too. On the way home I waved my arms like the two-pint revolutionary I am, telling my Tom how important it is to have common spaces for people to freely share ideas, to congregate—and the more that these places, like pubs, are restricted, taken away, closed down; the more the hospitality industry is left to wheeze on without support, the more suspicious I get.

Use your local pub. Drink there, enjoy it. But also, if it so moves you, use it for action too. Even if that action is only sewing the seeds of an idea. Even if it’s just showing somebody else that they are not alone in their thoughts. Pubs are powerful. What’s more—they are ours.

Other Stuff

• Steph Shuttleworth on pubs and brass bands. Yeaahhh, the north!

• Manchester’s entangled beer and wine scene, studied by Rachel Hendry.

• The TT Races have made a miniseries called Between the Hedges and I am loving it so far. Even if you don’t care about racing, the excitement of some of the riders still is just… It’s really sweet.

• MORE Rachel Hendry, in the form of her newsletter J’adore Le Plonk. This week: Bacchus. Sexy? She thinks so.

• A very good interview about poetry with poet Kevin P. Gilday.
  ”…poetry is so obsessed with keeping that door shut…it likes to be this insular little community where everyone feels very special about what they’re doing.”

• RIP Tom Verlaine. Patti Smith remembers him in a beautiful obituary.

• Nine ways of looking at a pint of Guinness, by Ana Kinsella.

• Funnily enough, Diageo announced this week that Guinness is the UK’s biggest selling beer (h/t Roger Protz.) If the figures can be independently verified, I wouldn’t be surprised—they’ve got the marketing, the consistency and the weight behind them to squash competition. What did surprise me, however, was the weirdly common response (on Twitter) to this news of “but I never see anyone drinking it!”
  Lies. Saying you’ve never seen anyone buy a Guinness at the pub is like saying you’ve never seen a Labrador. Have you never been to a wake? The social club with your granda? A bog-standard pub? Out drinking with me?

Evelyn Dunbar — A Land Girl And The Bail Bull, 1945

When hobbies become columns.

This tweet came along at exactly the right time, because I was about to write a twee and heartfelt letter about my own hobbies, extolling the joy and satisfaction of finding something to fill the winding hours with. But like the very best Tweets out there, of which there are a dwindling few, this sharp observation-framed-as-question made me look inwards and take a well-needed breath. No, I thought. The world does not need to hear every vague wandering of my mind. So what if I’ve found something that makes me feel like life is worth living? It’s not relevant to everyone. It’s actually quite boring. And what’s more, everyone knows they’re supposed to have a hobby—you’re not saying anything new. For once, critical inner-voice, you’re right. I can do better than this.

The thing is, right, that I’ve never been great at hobbies. I’m a workaholic, and it’s taken time and therapy to figure out how to not-work without feeling like I’m wasting my short time on earth. I actually wrote in a CV once that my hobbies and interests were working, because I couldn’t think of anything else to put. I did get the job, yes.

Katie Mather’s The Gulp is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I find it hard not to monetise the things I enjoy, so it’s been pretty useful to rediscover a few of my passions that I couldn’t possibly make any money out of. In fact, they are expensive to enjoy. I can’t write a recipe book about motorcycle racing. I can’t produce a zine full of my diary entries—everyone would die. Instead I have to enjoy these activities, learn about them, spend my precious time doing them, in the full knowledge that I will never receive anything in return but my own enjoyment. What the fuck is that about?

*Katie’s cookbook “Butties To Take To Creg-ny-Baa” is out on May 32nd 2023*

Other Stuff

• Strangers In The Night: Drinking in Parliament by Jimmy McIntosh for The Fence. I like to read every The Fence piece as though it’s a short story. It doesn’t matter to me if they’re real—even though they mostly are.

• A note about subscribing to newspapers and national mags—my friend Ian informed me that by getting the PressReader app and putting in your library card number, you can subscribe to many publications for free, but they still receive a license fee and you are also helping your local library by using it.

• James Pinder took some emotional photos Cyclocross National Championships in Milnthorpe last weekend you should all see.

• Rachel Hendry on Champagne and its influence on brewing, beer visuals and our perception of what both of these drinks actually mean to us.

My Stuff

• I wrote about drinking lime and lemonade in some of my favourite Manchester pubs with my best friend for Pellicle. What a lovely way to start the year.

• I’ve got quite a few pieces in the works for Ferment and Glug, so keep your eyes open.

Free Trade Inn Night by Kevin Day

Katie Mather’s The Gulp is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

A smell I didn’t know was nostalgic, a place in time I didn’t know I was nostalgic for.

Tom came back from the market with a punnet of strawberries and like always, I peered at the top to see where they’d come from. Small, shiny beauties from Scotland.

In the village where I grew up (okay, one of the villages where I grew up), there was an unofficial strawberry fortnight. During the summer holidays, or just before them, I can’t quite remember, the paper shop where I ended up working for a little while would put out pallets full of local strawberries on the produce table outside—and they would go within the hour. They smelled like the end of school and the sweet syrup of melted ice poles—like strawberry-flavoured things, like laces and milkshakes and jam and campinos—not like the fruits I knew. Those promised sweetness and tasted sour. These strawberries were joyful, and folks carried four punnets at a time, away home to make meringues, or jams, or to sit on the front garden popping one after another into their mouths. When I worked at the shop, I’d write down orders for them on the corner of a paper bag.

Today when I saw the tartan-printed label on our market-bought strawbs, my heart did a little flip. I opened the punnet, knowing that I expected some sort of fanfare. The smell took me away almost instantly to a patchwork of summer memories: beach swimming at St Cyrus, house parties in the middle of nowhere, tracing Edwardian schoolboy carvings at Edzell Castle, cycling too fast over gravel tracks, walking out, out, out into the woods and fields of the Howe o the Mearns. The white river behind the blue door. The end of High School.

The shop used to smell like this, I said. It felt good to have warm memories of time I almost forgot.

That’s nice, said Tom. That’s a nice memory.

Other Stuff

• Meet Me In Brixton McD’s — so good when people are given space to write about food that means something to them, whatever its provenance. Yvonne Maxwell paints a picture of her childhood and how McDonald’s was a part of it. Burgers are important, you know.

• I am once again begging you to follow Caffs Not Cafés on Instagram. While the name might suggest a certain anti-snobbery towards posher establishments, Isaac Rangaswami truly adores the caffs he visits, and records them faithfully and thoughtfully with every post. I learn more about London’s food culture from him than from anyone else, I think.

• On Pellicle this week, a fantastic piece by AJ Cox on the link between musicians and the beer industry. There’s a lot of crossover. It’s a super intriguing idea for a story.

• As someone who literally just decided to get into film photography (nothing special, point and click, I found the camera in our attic) and who might be the last person remaining on this earth who actually enjoys putting filters and stupid shit on their pictures, I have become super fascinated by the idea of “film soup”.

• The BierCult festival in Brussels is approaching and I am thrilled to be a part of it. It’s going to be a long weekend of beer talks, tastings and other beer-related fun, and I’ll be hosting something on natural wine as part of Sunday’s Compound Drinking session. If you’re going to be in the area, or you fancy popping across the channel to join in, you can get a ticket here.

My Stuff

Not much to report this week from me. A big project is about to finally go live so I’ll keep you updated on that in the coming weeks, and I’m currently spending all my free time writing copy for a famous travel website, which is keeping me busy but not exactly sane.

Keeping away from Twitter continues to do me a lot of good, and I’m urging you as a friend to scroll less. I know, it’s rich coming from someone like me. But it’s summer, and reading in the park with a bubbly water is what you deserve. Go enjoy yourself.

If you enjoy this newsletter, please consider sliding a tip over the counter. I am currently saving up to get some films developed, and to travel to Ulverston for a project of my own for once.

Film Soup – Stephanie Bryan

It’s a wine subscription magazine and I’m proud of it.

It’s almost a year since I was asked to be the commissioning editor for Glug, a new UK based wine magazine—a dream come true. Naturally I initially turned the job down, citing that I was already far too busy to take on a job I’d spent years working towards chasing, worried that I wouldn’t be able to do the job well enough on top of Corto and my commitments to Pellicle and my writing. Luckily for me, the team at Beer52 (well, Richard, mainly) were having none of that and I overcame the perfectionist urge to self-sabotage. And here we are.

It’s hard to explain what this role has meant to me over the past almost-year, but I’m going to try, because a lot of tarot draws and celestial goings on over the past couple of weeks have made it clear that I should be taking time to reflect and express gratitude.

At this stage I am just looking at the magazine whenever it arrives in the post and marvelling at the hard work everybody puts in to make it the thing that it is. I’m super proud of it. And here are some great pieces from it you can read online. Hope you enjoy.

• David Jesudason has written a three-part series on wine and racism and you can find the first two parts here and here.

• Rachel Hendry has written about Port and its connections to imperialism, colonialism and Empire.

• Rachel has written a lot for Glug, and here are some more of her pieces I’ve really enjoyed: Celebrity Wines and their purpose, a fantastical interview with Bacchus himself, why tinned fish is fashionable but canned wine is not,

• Wine educator and enthusiast Maureen Little writes about biodiversity from a personal perspective.

• Claire Leavey drinks wine made from the fruit grown, foraged and left by her mother, salvaged from the chest freezer.

• Ginger Rose Clark discusses sexism in French wine.

• Anna Richards talks to the young people who are leaving conventional careers behind and moving to vineyards to work and live.

• Ben Phillips writes about the Tour de France and cycling’s connection to grand wine estates.

• Samia Qaiyum, a Dubai-based writer, explores the stylish world of dry drinking.

• Sarah Nielsen gives us their recommendations for first date wine.

• Francesca Baker looks into the ill-considered world of calorie-conscious wine.

• Zanny Merullo Steffgen walks the Camino, bottle in hand.

• Sommelier Toussaint Stackhouse swaps Instagram for print to share his experiences of classical wine education and natural evangelism.

• Matthew Curtis talks about the individual joys of beer and wine.

• Jemma Beedie slams her wine list shut and orders with gusto.

I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed the job of commissioning and editing them—and please click around on the site to find even more pieces I couldn’t fit in this non-exhaustive list. That these writers, illustrators, designers, and so many others, have chosen to give their time and effort to contribute to Glug makes my little heart glow.

It’s been a big week of personal change, and things are only going to get changier. It’s odd that everything in the world seems to be in flux at a time when so much is being shuffled and reset in my own life. It feels like a natural break in transmission. Like lockdown was a temporary power cut, and as the lights flicker back on I’m looking around and seeing faces doing the same, noticing the world again.

Over the weekend I went into the Yorkshire Dales to go camping and I was worried about how I’d react to unfamiliar open spaces after so long in the same landscape. When we reached Malham, I realised how much I had missed green hills and limestone. I could have hugged every walker we passed in bright waterproofs. I can see my countryside again. We stopped talking for a moment, having not shut up for an hour, no radio on. We were both choked up by the sight of the steep valley of Wharfedale, and the thought of being free.

How melodramatic.

Other Stuff

• A sensitive and interesting look at Virgina Woolf’s letters to Violet Dickinson in the context of our current situation by Kamran Javadizadeh. “From where I sit today and write, Virginia’s desire to leave behind a climate of illness, to get up and go away, to be transported to a future one can’t quite see—and which may not exist—feels familiar and intense.”

• The joy and clear admiration in Rebecca May Johnson’s voice when she recounts how Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum changed her life and outlook is invigorating. Like being stood out in a stiff wind, or standing in a room full of music up as loud as it can go.

• Gay’s The Word bookshop are running a scheme where you can buy a copy of Gender Explorers for somebody else. Call 020 7278 7654 if you’d like to buy one as a donation. If you’d like a copy of the book but aren’t able to buy one at the moment, email gaystheword@gmail.com and they will send you a copy somebody else has purchased, subject to availability. (Remember to include your address in the email.)

• Rachel Hendry has created something really special with her off-the-cuff but deeply-felt weekly wine emails. J’Adore Le Plonk is the wine and culture newsletter that cuts through the shit to the truly joyful stuff that you didn’t know you needed. Here’s the full archive and signup link.

• I have said this before but Vittles is the fucking bomb. This week a newsletter contributed to by multiple writers focused on eating disorders and disordered eating, specifically during lockdown. Vital reading for anyone in the food and dining industry, difficult and relateable to many, important for everyone.

• Incarceratedly Yours is a zine created by artists incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison in California. This particular edition is about the worries and dangers posed by COVID-19 in the overstretched prison system, and asks why prison is seen as a suitable/functioning part of society in 2020. It’s a stunning piece of work that invites action as well as education. There’s a poem called Secret Ocean in it that really stopped me in my tracks.

• The Windrush Posters by Rianne Jones are now available to buy on her website. All proceeds will go to the Anchor Windrush campaign.

• Zinnebir, immortalised forever by Eoghan Walsh as the true beer of Brussels — “the Brussels people’s ale”. You can argue, but you’d be wrong.

• A profile and interview on Michaela Coel that’s so good I don’t know whether to be divinely inspired by her (and, fair play, the writer of the piece E. Alex Jung) or give up writing forever and move into a cave somewhere.

• I’m reading Boy Parts by Eliza Clark and it’s the first book I’ve picked up in ages that I can’t wait to get back to.

My Stuff

• I spoke to pro quizmasters about how to create the best pub quizzes so that I don’t have to answer who Henry VIII’s wives were in order ever again.

• I submitted some short stories to Unbound as a collection. Will let you know if I hear anything back.

• Tom and I are working on a very exciting project that I may be able to reveal more about in a couple of weeks. Before anyone “hilariously” asks, no, I’m not pregnant.

• Do you like vegan food? Follow Vegan MCR on Instagram, we are gonna be working on something together soon.

• Tonight I’m co-hosting a Graftwood Q+A for Manchester Cider Club. I’m worried I don’t actually have any decent cider to drink for it (my cupboards are bare and I forgot to put an order in! Sob!) but you should join us! Zoom link here. Starts at 7pm.

Zinnebir by James Albon

This weekend the pubs are opening. I know this, not because I read it in a paper or because I saw it on a sign pinned to the door of my local, but because it is the current constant ambient city street noise on Twitter. It’s a distant siren getting closer and closer. Soon the noise will get too loud to talk over and then it’ll just stop: the pubs will be open.

For sanity’s sake throughout this horrible few months of boring home imprisonment I’ve tried not to think about having a pint of Pride of Pendle with my friends and pubmates in the front room of the New Inn. But now I’m thinking about it, and I’m really looking forward to it. I really am. But it so happens that a friend and I booked a camping trip for this weekend, so I’m actually not going to be able to pop in for a ceremonial first-post-lockdown pint at my local. How fucking typical is that? 

I haven’t enjoyed drinking in the house. It’s not the same to chat over Zoom with a tinny. I’ve really missed being able to talk about things over a table of pints and a packet of quavers. Video calls feel forced, and I don’t ever want to say how I really feel. We’re keeping in touch and keeping each other’s heads above water. These conversations are not the place to set the world to rights. You can’t have a good-natured argument over the phone. Not easily anyway, and not while there are several horsemen of the apocalypse cantering overhead. So I will, despite being afraid to go outside and extremely nervous about catching a deadly virus, be going to the pub when I can and when I can be shown how safe it is. And I’m letting myself get a bit excited about that.

Other Stuff

• The microcosm garden in Geneva is where parts of CERN’s equipment now live in their retirement. 

• Joe Strummer made a radio show for the BBC in 1998 and you can listen to it here. I highly recommend it, especially if you love reggae, punk, world music, Latin jazz and maybe even some Berlin techno.

• Get your Pellicle shirt here. Be cool.

• “But plant roots can crack and buckle even concrete slabs.” Ruby Tandoh’s wonderful story of Esiah Levy’s life’s purpose as a gardener, and of seeds and migration and preservation.

• I have no tie to Chicago. I do seem to read about it fairly often though. This report on Blackbird restaurant closing forever due to the coronavirus was sad, all reports like it are, but one question in it stuck with me: “Are we even Chicago without Blackbird?” What would have to close near me to make me ask a similar question?

• Transform Harm is a really useful resource hub full of articles and information about important topics worth educating ourselves about and interrogating like abolition, transformative justice, carceral feminisms and community accountability.

• I have never been to the USA, but I do watch a lot of TV shows and listen to a lot of music. I’ve always wondered what a 40 was, so I gave in this week and Googled it, and found not one but two great articles about them.

• Something I’ve been coming to terms with recently is that my view of food has been unrealistically comfortable and rose-tinted. Articles like this one by Bettina Makalintal describe how narratives in food programming are overwhelmingly white, and that food does not, and cannot, and should not be allowed to be seen to transcend the political and social issues bound up within its production, preparation and distribution.

• How can food media work to improve and ultimately stamp out its racism? Cathy Erway for Grub Street has some solid ideas.

• Sandra Oh on bringing her characters’ ethnicities forward in the work she does (most recently Killing Eve) because nobody else is stepping up.

• “How To Know You’re Not Insane” is a difficult but essential read on how Nicholas Carter was gaslit and fired from his writing role at Cards Against Humanity, sectioned despite being healthy, and ultimately fired because he tried to speak up against racism within the company.

• A review of Underworld’s 1999 Glastonbury appearance, dictated over the phone while the writer was off his tits.

• I want to play this game very much. Hurry up and be released.

My Stuff

• I’ve spent this whole week trying to finish the first draft of my book (which I thought was finished but absolutely was not).

• I also entered two short story competitions this week. As always, thank you very much if you tipped me via ko-fi — this is how I paid for the (frankly, extortionate this time) entry fees.

• From the archives: Bread For All, And Cider Too — my interview with Dick and Cath, the Manchester real cider activists.

Joe Strummer running the London Marathon — Steve Rapport

Someone asked on Twitter whether the Angel of the North should be torn down considering the deserved fate of so many monuments to slavery this week. It made me wonder why someone would openly admit they didn’t understand the context of the situation, or know the difference between a sculpture and a statue. But as usual, I was being naive. They weren’t confused at all. They were deflecting.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the word “gullible” and how often I refer to myself as being so. Is it bad to be gullible when all it means is to trust the word of someone else? Is it a sign of stupidity? Am I right to be deeply disappointed in myself every time I believe a lie?

Like Seymour Skinner, I’ve decided no. It’s the rest of the world that’s wrong. I might be gullible, but that means I’m not a cynic. I might occasionally make a tit out of myself for believing something, but at least I have belief. Over time I’ve learned to protect myself better by reading and learning, so that I’m not led astray. But I’ve realised I’ve also worked hard to make sure this hasn’t made me less open-minded or ready for change. Maybe this is why I have faith that the world can become a better, fairer place. Because no matter how many people tell me the world can’t run that way, I still believe in it. And if that’s gullibility, I’m okay with that.

By the way, it’s almost exactly a year since I started The Gulp. Imagine that! I have always said that I would never make this a paid-for “service” and that’s still true. However if you’ve found inspiring links through this newsletter, or you’ve just enjoyed getting told a strange little story every week, and you’d like to send a monetary token of gratitude my way, here is my Paypal and here is my Ko-Fi. Thank you very much.

Other Stuff

• Jeezy chreezie do I love writing when it takes me on a journey, like this fun adventure around Pisa by Craig Ballinger.

• “What do you really miss about restaurants?” asks Pamela Brunton. Earlier this week I tweeted about missing Safran, partly because of it’s food, but also because I remember it as where I have had my best friendly arguments, longest conversations and created the funniest in-jokes. 

• During the immediate aftermath of the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, and during the protests that followed, I was getting most of my news updates from Unicorn Riot. This piece in the New Yorker is a really interesting insight into this not-for-profit media collective.

• A never-published-before short story by little-known cult writer Ernest Hemingway.

• Are you subscribed to J’Adore le Plonk yet? You should be. This week’s is about prosecco, and privilege, and accessibility, and it’s brilliant.

• Alicia Kennedy’s newsletter this week was about anarchism and feeding the fight and as usual, it was a timely, fascinating and enlightening read full of further reading tips and links. Subscribe. Read. Do it now.

• Food critic Jimi Famurewa missed his mum’s cooking, so asked her to teach him some of his fave Nigerian dishes over zoom and then wrote about the partially-calamitous results for The Guardian. It’s so bittersweet and so good. 

• A Twitter thread by Ruby Tandoh on what the food industry could be if we stepped up and challenged those in charge to tackle racism in their own houses.

• This week I missed Anthony Bourdain on the sad anniversary of his death. This piece about tracing his footsteps and eating crab backs in San Francisco by Matthew Curtis is a whole-hearted reminder of what he meant to so many of us in the food and drink world, and a very suitable way to raise a glass to his memory.

• Following this week’s loose theme of anarchism and community action, Jonathan Nunn writes about what restaurants could be to their communities; places of nutrition, social spaces, anti-poverty activism hubs.

• Thank you to David Sun Lee for bringing the CBC podcast Frontburner to my attention. This episode on Bon Appétit, race and food culture is so good, especially on the topic of white people as the centre of the food media universe and therefore the prioritised audience for it.

• Ruby Tandoh’s Instagram post about her new book Cook As You Are also goes into the way food media culture is seen through a white lens. Her views on inclusivity and accessibility in food are always so inspirational to me.

My Stuff

• If a pint of mild is poured without someone debating its waning existence, did it ever get poured at all?

• What are brewers up to during lockdown and furlough? Let’s find out.

• Thank you to those of you who sent tips my way over the past couple of weeks. I used the money to enter three writing competitions, and I used the rest to top up my donations to Black Visions Collective, Unicorn Riot and Black Lives Matter, among other individual Black and trans fundraisers. I, and they, really appreciate your support.

• This month I have no fewer than 13 short story and writing competitions on my list.  Of course I will not enter all 13 competitions. I’ll let you know how I get on.

From 24 Hour Pisa People, by Craig Ballinger

Ugh, to be stood there, drinking beer, smelling food, hearing laughs.

When lockdown started, I learned so much about my mental health from Instagram. Memes about trauma and PTSD appeared more often — maybe because of friends engaging with them, maybe because I was interacting with similar memes for the first time. Some were really helpful. One encouraged me to reach out to my family.

Being shut in made me less cynical of text-art affirmations. I was liking things I’d never be seen dead liking in the past. Strangers telling me to “stay lucky” and “be kind to yourself”. Bubble writing, flowers and steaming mugs of tea. I was agitated and had an attention span of zero, and they were helping me to see that I wasn’t the only one. That I needed to give myself a break. (I can easily give myself a hard time for not working while I’m actually working.) Recently though, the affirmations have changed, and I’m noticing a sinister tone. It’s fine not to move all day, if that’s what I want. I can sleep for as long as I like, because I am nourishing my body with rest (and plus, lucky me I guess, I don’t have a job to go to.) I can say whatever I want to people, because I’m growing as a person and only the good ones will stick around.

In a particularly bad bleak hole last week, memes told me it was the norm to feel this way. That there was no use fighting it. Luckily I’m experienced enough in depression and intrusive/suicidal thoughts to realise (eventually) that this is total crap. However, some people aren’t as bored of the cycle’s bullshit as I am. For some people, it’s as fresh and searing and painful as ever.

I wanted to use my newsletter this week to ask you to check in with anyone you haven’t heard from in a little while. To report any memes you see online that could give people dangerous ideas — or that just seem plain irresponsible. To promise to look after yourselves as the uncertainty of the moment rolls on, and remember that as much as I want you to take care of yourselves, it is so you do something good for you. Do what soothes you, but also take care of your body and your mind too. Self-care, as far as I understand it, doesn’t mean making yourself comfortable all the time. It means doing things like taking your medications, or continuing with therapy, or returning to CBT techniques (that’s what I’ve been doing), or taking a deep breath and calling or messaging a friend when you feel like you can’t or that they might be struggling with something you don’t quite understand. It can mean admitting to yourself that even though you’re “generally fine” something is the matter and you need to take some time to deal with it, or just remembering to drink water, eat vegetables, or doing some exercise. It can mean not slipping into duvet-soft bleak thoughts and doing uncomfortable things instead. Even the most mentally fortified people are struggling at the moment. You matter. I hope you know that.

Other Stuff

• I’ve never been to the Free Trade Inn, but it sounds like my sort of place. A grand mix of people, decent beers, welcoming to all. I’m glad Martin Flynn chose to write about it.

• The other week I shared a great article on the fake beer brand invented by a prop company that pops up in all the TV shows I watch. Graphic designer Annie Atkins who worked on, among many other TV shows and movies,The Grand Budapest Hotel has written a book about designing props and graphics that suit the look, feel and atmosphere of the work they appear in. How amazingly cool is that?

• Speaking about books (when am I not tbh), this one called The New Traditional really taps into an itchy part of my brain that wants to think deeply about modern trends returning to “heritage crafts”, and how these things become co-opted by wealthier people as lifestyle choices. Keeping traditions alive is, imo, a grand endeavour, but even grander is recognising the people who continued to do so when newer processes took their place over the 20th century, and not being congratulatory towards people who “rediscovered” these arts and crafts. I don’t own this book but I’ve been considering buying it, so if you’ve read it I’d love to know what you thought!

• I’ve been enjoying Jia Tolentino’s writing this week. I’ve also been enjoying reading about what other writers think about Jia Tolentino’s writing. Andrea Marks interviewed her for Rolling Stone and it’s a great, balanced-on-the-complimentary-side read. The Paris Review can’t get enough of her in this gushing interview by Brian Ransom. Lauren Oyler at the London Review Of Books has a complex relationship with her writing, but ultimately thinks, in Tolentino’s book at least, she’s self-obsessed and lacking in depth and conviction. I like this. It tells me: “make your own mind up.”

• Browse the entire National Gallery collection via their site. I’m going to be doing this tomorrow, rosé in hand.

• Speaking of rosé, a new wine newsletter called J’Adore le Plonk by Rachel Hendry began this week and this week’s topic — why rosé is her favourite — made me want to revisit pink wine. (I’m usually a white wine guy)

• Helen Rosner spoke to activist-artist Tunde Wey about his assertions that the restaurant industry should be allowed to die. It’s a brilliant read.

• The virus has taken so much from us, but as James Greig writes in this heartbreaking piece, it’s also taken away our rituals of grief. I do recommend this read, but it’s very sad. Just a warning.

• A huge and important essay on radical body positivity, moving easily between diet culture, EDs, fatphobia, race and feminism.

• I revisited some old demons this week related to being managed badly in the past. This article on the Productivity Myth really highlights some of the terrible working practices we may not even realise we’ve been labouring under.

My Stuff

• I’m a short story comp this week, so all good vibes over the ether are appreciated

• Find a copy of Ferment Magazine to read my latest published pieces

• I’m still looking for cool things to share in The Gulp’s birthday edition! Send things you like to katiematherwrites@gmail.com

• If you enjoy this newsletter and you feel like contributing towards it’s continued success (?), tips sent via my ko-fi page are always hugely appreciated. Thank you!

Annie Atkins’ “Mendl’s” prop from The Grand Budapest Hotel